Weather the Winter Storms with a Good Beer

Our construction timeline benefitted greatly from the mild weather that lingered through November and December. As we rang in the New Year, winter weather came roaring in with it. With temperatures in the single digits and the snow piling up, there’s no better time to warm up by the fire with a nice dark beer.

Many beer lovers tend to think of beer as seasonal – light lagers, cream ales, and shandies in the summer; märzens, pumpkin, and harvest ales in the fall, and so on.  While we at SLBC never like to place rules or limitations on the enjoyment of good beer, there is definitely something to be said about imbibing a nice dark porter in the dreary midst of winter.

The Porter style of beer originated in England and is typically brown in color and very lightly hopped to accentuate the malt flavor and aroma. The roasted malts contribute caramel and chocolate notes and give it the brown color, which can range from light to dark depending on the type and quantity used.

Over the past few years as homebrewers, we have honed a porter recipe that represents the style well but also adds our own unique twist. This beer will be a mainstay in our taproom, with some variations on it rotating through the tap list. One such variation came unexpectedly last year as a family friend who serves as foreman for a local fruit farm dropped off a few buckets of cherries and asked us if we can use them to make beer. We had a porter finishing up secondary fermentation at the time and decided to try something new, combining our passion for keeping things local with our love of experimentation. We added some of the cherries along with some cocoa nibs into the fermenter and waited a few months to see what it would become. After what seemed like an eternity, the beer was kegged, carbonated and tapped at our home pub on Christmas day.

Beer has served as a catalyst for bringing people together since the history of civilization. In summertime Sister Lakes, it doesn’t take much to get people together for sun and fun. In the winter, it takes something truly special to get people out of hibernation and back into social gear. When we tapped this chocolate cherry porter, we found just that special thing. So when the weather outside is frightful, get together with friends, family and some porter, light a fire, and drink heartily.

Construction Updates

We have been so busy working on getting the brewery up and running that we haven’t had time to update you with what has been going on.  Since you are the most important aspect of our business (right along with our fine crafted beers of course), we figured we’d better put down our hammers, pick up the computer and get to blogging. 

The best place to start is with the fantastic showing of support we received last weekend.  When we sent the message out to our family and friends that we were having a work weekend and we looking for some help, we figured we may be able to recruit a few people.  What we did not expect was over 30 people – family members, friends, and even some people we didn’t yet know - to show up in force ready to work! The weekend’s projects included: building a retaining wall, digging trenches for plumbing, demolition of the interior of the north building, clearing trees and brush and removing the old playground equipment.  For those of you that came out to help us, we can’t thank you enough! 

Other recent updates to the building include a new roof.  There was a portion of the old roof that had some serious problems and needed to be fixed.  Rather than fixing part of the roof now and having to fix the rest in a few years, we opted to replace the whole thing.  We have also freshened up the building with a new coat of paint, giving it a much nicer shade (sand dune) and removing the name of the previous business from the front of the building.   Inside of the building we have demo’d it down to studs and concrete.  We have framed in the spots for the windows and doors which are on order and should be arriving shortly.  Insulation is currently being sprayed on to create a moisture barrier and get us all sealed up for the winter.  The floor concrete floors are cut and ready for plumbing which should begin this week. 

Please enjoy the pictures below from our family and friends work weekend as well as before and after pictures.  Check back soon for our next blog entry!

Before:

Now:

Work weekend pictures:

Location, location, location...

Exciting things have been going on in the world of the Sister Lakes Brewing Company.  We knew you’d be interested in sharing in our excitement, so we thought we’d post it to our blog!

The first nugget of exciting news is that we have officially locked in the location that will become the Sister Lakes Brewing Company.  We have secured and will soon begin renovating the old hardware store located at 92500 County Road 690 in Sister Lakes (Dowagiac), Michigan.

We have a lot of work ahead of us in the coming days and months to transform the building from a former hardware store into a fully functioning micro-brewery.   When it’s all finished we will provide a warm and inviting atmosphere for your friends and family to gather around a pint of delicious beer.  Our goal is to provide a place for you to share your passions while we share our passion for great beer with you. 

The second nugget of excitement to share is the recent changes to the language in the Keeler Township zoning ordinance.  Over the past few months we have had the pleasure of working with the fine folks of Keeler Township to introduce new language into the township zoning ordinance that allows for breweries, micro-breweries, distilleries and wineries to operate within Keeler Township. 

This new language ensures that residents and visitors to our area don’t miss out on the beer and wine explosion that is taking over Southwest Michigan.  It also opens the door for new beginnings and endless possibilities for Keeler Township and the Sister Lakes area.  Of all the new language written into the zoning ordinance, we are most excited about, you guessed it, micro-breweries.  After all, if you are reading this blog, you know that we are opening a micro-brewery.

Our focus is on you, the community, so if you see us out there working, please stop by and tell us your story.  We would love the opportunity to tell you ours!

We would like to thank the folks at the Keeler Township for being so great to work with and we would also like to thank you for joining us in fostering community, one pint at a time.

Fostering Community, One Pint at a Time…

As you may have read in the previous post, our family has been coming to Sister Lakes since 1937 when our Great Grandfather bought a cottage on Round Lake to create a family gathering place. Over the generations as the family grew and spread out across the country, one thing has remained constant. Sister Lakes is where our family comes to gather. For us, however, family is a much broader term than just those related to us.

As a child, I always enjoyed sitting around my grandparents’ house and watching visitors come and go and hearing stories exchanged. It was understood that if the lights were on, you were always welcome. No invitation was ever required to come to the Morin home and only strangers knocked. As we got older and started inviting friends to the lake, it didn’t take long for them to feel like family as well. When our parents bought the house next door to our grandparents’ home, it was understood that friends and family always had an open invitation.

After we seriously started considering this venture, we decided we should sit down and figure out exactly WHY we wanted to do this. In addition to just wanting to share great beer, we wanted to give back to and advance the community in which we live. Our vision for our brewery is a community gathering place where all are welcome and can engage one another in sharing ideas and passions, reminiscent of old European public houses and beer halls. Throughout history, some of the greatest thinkers have come together over a beer to change the world.

As we sat talking in the bar in our parents’ house on Round Lake, we realized that what we wanted to do was open up the welcoming and inclusive environment of our home bar to the rest of the Sister Lakes community and beyond. Many friends in the Sister Lakes area stop by regularly to share stories and drink good beer. We love entertaining guests, sharing our homebrewed beer and answering questions about how it is made. If our small home bar can be such a strong catalyst for building community, we can’t wait to see what kind of community we can foster with a brewery.

Cheers, Prost, and Sláinte!